If Asians said the stuff white people say... Friend and former colleague Aleck L. (who hails from Taiwan) sent me this hilarious spoof. I suspect this is more universal between cultures and races than people on the receiving end assume. After all, if you're Asian, then you're going to hear all the stereotypical Asian assumptions – and not the others.

I've been amused quite a few times by assumptions people from other cultures or races have made about me. What leaps immediately to mind were my earliest experiences (in the early '90s) driving around Estonia. I often met people who had never met an American before – and when they heard that I was from California, the almost inevitable follow-up was to ask me about various movies stars, with the assumption that I must know them personally :) I also vividly remember a black guy from Chicago who was part of my mess decks crew when I was in the Navy. He was continually astonished at the stuff we white people would eat – especially vegetables. Much of the Navy diet was food he'd never tasted before, and which he associated with white people. And then there was my Indian colleague who was continually amused by (from his perspective) the American/white beliefs about dating, sex, and marriage – he thought we were four or five centuries behind the Indians in those regards :)

Politics and intelligence... You may remember the study from a few years ago that prompted headlines like “Conservatives stupider than liberals!” The progressives had a field day with that. I was skeptical of the result, partly because the test design seemed rather simplistic and prone to error.

This morning I ran across another study, with quite different results – and results that comport more closely with my own experiences. The last sentence in the linked article is one that resonates particularly strongly with me:

As gratifying as Carl's research findings are, it is still a deep puzzle to me why it apparently takes high intelligence to understand that the government should stay out of both the bedroom and the boardroom.

If it's true that only people with higher than average intelligence love liberty (of all kinds), then demographics are dooming this country – because at least since the beginning of the 20th century there's a well-documented inverse correlation between IQ and fertility (that is, the higher one's IQ, the fewer children one tends to have). Isn't that the drums of doom I'm hearing?

I'll add to the discussion this post I ran across a while back: basically it shows that the members of the Triple Nine Society (whose members have IQs above 99.9% of the overall population) hold very libertarian views on average. One must add a strong caveat to this survey, though: it's from a self-selected group of triple-niners who want to be in such an organization. I have no idea how that skews the data, but I'm pretty sure it does :)